


Slipping Out of Time

by Scrawlers



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst With A Bittersweet Ending, Gen, immortality AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-26
Updated: 2016-09-26
Packaged: 2018-08-17 12:03:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8143180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scrawlers/pseuds/Scrawlers
Summary: During the final battle the megalith explodes, and both Alan and Ash are bathed in the power granted to it by Xerneas.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was written, once again, before the Flare arc concluded, but it was still written pretty late into the Flare arc. Essentially, we had a preview for XYZ042 that showed what looked to be the megalith exploding (and were also told in episode summaries that Alan and Ash would be going into the megalith), I had an idea, and ran with it. This was the result.
> 
> As a final note, this work contains a content warning for suicidal ideation and attempted suicide.

****Alan is blinded by brilliant rainbow light as the megalith explodes, but instead of the shrapnel he expects to feel cutting into his skin, all he feels is something soft and cool, like early morning mist.

When the light fades, and he regains his bearings enough to look up (Ash blinking, dazed, beside him), it’s to see the Director staring down at him, a satisfied smirk twisting his features.

“You made your decision,” the Director tells him. “I hope you’re capable of living with it.”

**\- - -**

He doesn’t notice that anything is wrong for a long time.

Human growth is strange. Babies grow at a rate that makes the differences noticeable almost by the day, and puberty makes kids shoot up like awkward, gangly weeds. But once a certain age is reached growth slows, noticeable not by sudden spurts or washes of maturity, but in subtle lines and the graying of hairs. Still, the day Alan turns twenty-five, Manon leans on his shoulder and laughs.

“Hey, what moisturizer do you use? I wanna stock up for when I’m as old as you so I can still look young!”

He rolls his eyes, but smiles as he pushes her off—not roughly, just enough to make her stand up on her own.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, and he still doesn’t think much of it, even if it is annoying that he’s still treated like a teenager by everyone who meets him. He’s twenty-five, but he looks young. It must just be good genes.

Must be.

**\- - -**

He doesn’t know if it was just that strong of a lack of self-awareness, or if it was denial, or if maybe it was a combination of the two. But by the time he’s thirty and still doesn’t look a day over fifteen, there’s really no denying it anymore.

The megalith was completely vaporized, its power and remnants washing over Ash, Pikachu, Alan, and Lizardon, so there’s no hope of studying it, to find out if it really was a crystallized source of Xerneas’ power or if there’s anyway of reversing its effects. Alan sits on a chair in the professor’s study (and the professor looks so much older now, clearly defined smile lines around his eyes and streaks of grey in his hair), and the two of them pour over ancient texts and tablets, studying and taking notes and sharing what they find with each other, just like old times. There is information about Xerneas, of course—stories of its power to bring and grant life eternal—but the stories are vague and left without conclusions. Not that that, Alan supposes, is exactly true. The stories do conclude with the life granted, with the people rejoicing, with no one dead and everyone living happily ever after. But they don’t say what comes next—what happens after the after, when one person or pokémon is left alive while everyone around them withers and dies.

There are no stories for that, at least not in the books and resources they have. None of the texts they’ve unearthed say anything about that, though the professor thinks that there are probably other texts out there—other cave carvings and tablets yet to be discovered, and his eyes shine when he talks about the wonders that he is sure exist out in the world, just waiting to be found.

So Alan goes traveling.

**\- - -**

When Alan is in his twenties and Manon is a teenager, people think they are fraternal twins, or at least siblings close in age.

When Alan is in his thirties and Manon in her twenties, people think he is _her_ younger brother.

When Alan is in his forties and Manon in her thirties, people think he is her son.

And when Alan still looks like a teenager despite being sixty-five, people think Manon is his grandmother.

She loves it, of course. It’s always a joke to her, always all smiles and laughter. She playfully tells him to go to his room when people mistake them for mother and son, pinches his cheeks when people assume she is his grandmother, laughing—always, always laughing—when he rolls his eyes and bats her hands away. Even if she _looks_ older, he still _is_ , and he does his best to watch out for her anyway. That’s his job. It doesn’t matter what people think, and Alan knows that is what Manon is trying to tell him when she laughs and makes a joke of it. People don’t know the situation, and they don’t need to know, because what they think doesn’t matter anyway.

But somehow, it still does.

**\- - -**

He was supposed to protect them. It was his job to protect them.

But how do you protect someone from old age?

It’s not that he didn’t know they would die. He did, and every time he noticed how _they_ aged and grew while _he_ stayed the same, he was reminded of the ticking clock steadily beating away inside his head, reminding him that time was precious and finite and that even the densest beaches could be worn away by surf and wind. He has to watch them grow old, and that is hard—harder than he thought it would be, even when it comes to the professor, who was always older than him even before he was cursed by Xerneas’ will. But it’s harder when you aren’t walking that path with them, he thinks, harder when you know that you are going to have to live on even when they no longer exist, harder still when you have to accept this about the people who are younger than you.

It’s a small comfort that they both live to old age, that they die of natural causes. It’s a small comfort that he has a cluster of people to help him with the professor’s funeral preparations, and a smaller comfort that Manon had adopted children over the years who mostly took care of hers. It’s a small, tiny, microscopic, nonexistent comfort as he stands at the back of the funeral proceedings with Lizardon, and leaves halfway through.

It was his job to protect them. He was supposed to protect them.

But now they are dead and gone while he is still here, and he can never have them back.

**\- - -**

He wants to die. It has been three days since Manon’s funeral and he is ninety-seven but looks fifteen and Alan wants to die.

He could still be there for her kids. She had kids. But her kids are all grown now, and they have kids of their own, and they rarely saw him as it is and don’t need him anyway, and besides, they’re not—it’s not the _same_ , and even if it was they’re growing, too, growing older and plodding along the same path toward death, so what’s the point? What’s the point in getting to know them better, of growing closer and attached, when at the end of it all the same damn thing will happen again, and again, and _again_ with no end ever?

( _“You’ve got so much left to see. So much! Think of all you’ll get to see, and learn, and_ do _. You can go anywhere, do anything, and never stop, never stop experiencing. You can travel and see and feel and never, ever stop. And I want you to. I want you to keep moving forward, keep learning, and keep_ living _. Can you do that for me, Alan? Can you promise me that?”_

_“. . . Yeah. I promise.”_ )

None. There is none. There is no point, no _meaning_ , no reason and no purpose, and he has known that for years but feels it even more intimately now as it claws against his chest and screams relentlessly in his head. So after he makes a pit stop by Saffron City, Kanto’s underground to buy the strongest pills he can get his hands on and a bottle of liquor the likes of which could knock out a rhydon after two shots, he goes to Johto and gets himself good and lost in Ilex Forest, figuring that’s as good a place to die as any.

( _“And—”_

_“‘And’? This is already a list.”_

_“Listen, listen! It’s important._ And _—you have to be okay. Okay? You have to be okay. I need you to promise me, Alan. I know you’re strong—you’re the strongest!—but you have to promise me you’ll be_ okay _.”_

_“Yeah. I’ll be fine. I always am.”_ )

He unscrews the cap on the liquor bottle and tosses it to the side, pops off the cap on the pill bottle and knocks three into his palm. That’s enough to start with for now. He can probably swallow three at once, and then go for the next three, and then the next and the next. And even if he can’t, and he chokes and dies, well, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? So it didn’t go as planned. So what? It will work either way and that’s all that matters.

But he stops, little marked pills the palm of his left hand and the neck of the liquor bottle clutched in his right, when his eyes fall on Lizardon’s pokéball. He had emptied his pockets to get at the pill bottle, his hands shaking too badly to retrieve it easily otherwise, and in the process he tossed Lizardon’s pokéball down onto the grass. It stares at him now, still and silent, red and white against green—and he never explicitly promised Lizardon like he promised the others, never said what he would or wouldn’t do, never said a single word about it even after he had decided—but the unspoken promises mean more to Lizardon now than the ones spoken aloud mean to the other two, because they’re dead and gone while Lizardon is still here, still alive and still _breathing_ and Lizardon—Lizardon still needs him.

The pills fall from Alan’s hand and the alcohol spills over the grass when he drops the bottle. He grasps at Lizardon’s pokéball, but muscle memory built up over the past eight decades means that he has Lizardon beside him in a flash. And when he sees Lizardon—when their eyes meet, and Lizardon looks at him with love and curiosity and understanding even if he doesn’t know what Alan had been about to do, Alan throws his arms around Lizardon’s neck and sobs, and sobs, and sobs.

**\- - -**

He still wants to die, most days. But it’s a passive sort of persistent thought, and he never tries again after the first.

He had dropped the pills—all of them, every last one—into a stream in Ilex Forest after he had calmed down that night. It was more than a few thousand pokén wasted, but it wasn’t like he didn’t have an eternity to earn it back.

He and Lizardon travel. They keep moving forward, just as he had promised Professor Sycamore, never staying in one place for too long. He never returns to the lab. He left it Sophie’s and Cosette’s care after the professor’s funeral, and knows that they will leave it to their assistants when they pass on as well, and so it’s in good hands. But he doesn’t think he can bear to see it—doesn’t think he can stand to go back there, to go there when the professor _isn’t_ and never will be again, and every time he thinks that maybe he’s finally ready, he feels like he has swallowed arbok venom instead. So he doesn’t.

But he travels together with Lizardon as the years blur together, and he loses track of exactly how old they are at some point after one hundred. He has a rough guesstimate, but he doesn’t celebrate his birthday, doesn’t care to pay attention to the year whenever he glances at a calendar or newspaper date line, and doesn’t really need his age for anything considering that no one would believe him if he knew anyway. So he loses track and doesn’t mind it as they go from place to place, canvassing each spot on the globe and somehow still managing to unearth new waterfalls or spelunk in new caves every now and again. They travel to different places, see new things, and Alan—

He learns. He doesn’t always know what it is that he’s learned, doesn’t always recognize that he has learned something each day even though he knows he must have, doesn’t always see the merit in the things that he writes down in his journal (an act of forced labor at first, a habit that he strong-arms himself into getting back into, because he was always taught that it’s important to record your findings and maybe this will, somehow, help). But he learns, all the same. He travels, and he sees, and he hears, and he feels, and he learns, and he _lives._

He keeps his promise.


End file.
